So the pc’s have amassed quite a lot of loot. As in, the RAW Bag of Holding is about to burst. I don’t want to really bother with that, or the weight of treasure anyway, so there should really be something ”bigger”. So I came up with an artefact: The Deep Chest.
It is an obvious treasure chest of indetermined origin. 3x1.5x1.5 ft in dimensions with an additional 0.5ft tall arched lid. The wood it is made of and the iron reinforcements on the corners look as if it had been sunken in seawater for a decade. The wood has been carved with a curious tentacle motif that seems to shift and writhe ever so slightly. When opened it is loosely filled with junk. Pots and pans, dented and oxidised, a rusty hilt poking up between some decayed leather, pieces of wood you have no idea what it used to be.
And if viewed through a Detect Magic effect it shines like a thousand suns...
The magic of the chest is thus:
- It contains an extradimensional space, much alike a bag of holding, only the space is limitless. This space is called The Void
- Within the Void, objects are subject to normal decay as if left on the mercy of nature. So if you leave a sword in it for years, it will rust eventually, and so on.
- There is virtually infinite amount of old junk in the Void.
- When the chest is opened, it presents a random assortment of contents from those within the Void, with the few most recently placed objects at sight
- If you place anything in the chest, the contents shift a little to accommodate it. When you close the lid and open it again the recently placed object will have shuffled deeper into the pile and the other objects in the pile have been randomised again.
- Opening the chest takes an action
- You can retrieve any specific object you know is in the chest (ie. those you have seen placed there) in 1d5 rounds by digging through the contents.
- You can retrieve almost any generic object that is in poor condition by digging through the contents for 1d5 minutes.
- You can retrieve a randomly determined generic object in poor condition as a bonus action.
- If you have attuned to the chest, when you place an item in the chest you can designate one item to stay on the top of the junk pile, and thus retrieve it as a bonus action from an open chest.
- The chest keeps appearing near you when no one is paying attention, no matter where in the world you are.
- If you are on another plane, it takes 1d5 hours for the chest to find you, and reappear near you.
- If you have attuned to the chest, you can suppress its teleportation until you choose to want it again, after which it reappears in an unobserved space near you in 1d5 minutes (or 1d5 hours if you are on another plane).
Those are the basic functions of the Deep Chest. In addition the chest is actually sentient, and actually chooses its owner. You may claim ownership, but if the chest disagrees there’s nothing you can do. The chest craves attention however, and if it is currently unowned, it will latch to the first who it deems likely to place objects within. Its alignment is Chaotic Neutral and it may occasionally pull a prank by messing with its basic abilities. The more removed your alignment is from the chest’s, the more likely it is to prank you.
The origins of the Deep Chest and its sentiense lie in the Far Realms, and it is a manifestation of some long lost and forgotten nightmare. It will, very slowly, and very subtly influence its owner to hoard anything, to place objects within and to forever forget them.